The Looming Water Disaster That Could Destroy California, and Enrich Its Billionaire Farmers http://www.alternet.org/water/146130/the_looming_water_disaster_that_could_destroy_california%2C_and_enrich_its_billionaire_farmers

Just like the oligarchs who used the shock of Hurricane Katrina's destruction to tear down public housing, privatize public schools and pillage the city's poorest, California's most powerful business interests have positioned themselves to profit from this disaster. A handful of billionaire farmers and real estate developers are in line to pull off the most brazen water heist in American history, seizing control over much of Northern California's water supplies and do what they have always wanted: turn water, a shared public resource, into a private asset that can be traded on the open market.

At the center of this epic water grab is the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, a Yosemite-sized patchwork of waterways and farmland an hour east of Oakland that sits atop California's single largest water source. Formed by the confluence of state's two largest rivers as they flow out to the San Francisco Bay, more than half of all rainfall and snowmelt drains through the Delta, supplying two-thirds of California with water and irrigating most of the state's farmland.

The Delta's agricultural, fishing and tourism industries produce up $5 billion in combined economic output a year and the region remains one of California's last holdouts of small and family farms. It is also home to the most dangerous flood control system in America."Now we realize it may be the single most at-risk piece of property in the United States," John Radke, a professor at UC Berkeley's Department of City and Regional Planning, told Emergency Management magazine. "If you had a catastrophic event there and you can't get things built, you won't just have people unable to go across a bridge, you'll have people without drinking water -- 22 million of them."